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Shtetl vs Dork - What's the difference?

shtetl | dork |

As a noun shtetl

is a jewish village or small town, especially one in eastern europe.

As a proper noun dork is

ellis island records indicate people registering as early as 1907 with dork as their last name [http://ellisislandorg/search/matchmoreasp?lnm=dork&plnm=dork&first_kind=1&kind=exact&offset=0&dwpdone=1].

shtetl

English

(wikipedia shtetl)

Noun

(en-noun)
  • A Jewish village or small town, especially one in Eastern Europe.
  • * 1992 , Will Self, Cock and Bull :
  • However, you are right to suspect that there is some connection between my carefully considered opinion of the Hebrew people and this marvellous recital which your waxy ears, full of the cheesy gunk of the shtetl , have been so fortunate to hear.
  • * 2005 , Martin Torgoff, Can't Find My Way Home (Simon & Schuster), page 8:
  • Most of the second-generation immigrant kids of his neighborhood had been [...] as desperate to go to college and become lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and leave the teeming city for the suburbs, as their parents had been to leave behind the shtetls of Russia.
  • * 2010 , Peter Conrad, The Monthly , April 2010, Issue 55, The Monthly Ptd Ltd, page 52-3:
  • Albert Speer had a big vision for it during the Third Reich, with boulevards and gigantic monuments, and we definitely don't want that again. It's a collection of villages, of shtetls as we say in Yiddish.

    dork

    English

    Etymology 1

    US 1960s, sense of "silly person" presumably from earlier use as bowdlerization of Lawrence Poston, “ Some Problems in the Study of Campus Slang,” American Speech 39, no. 2 (May 1964) (JSTOR 453113): p. 118.Historical Dictionary of American Slang, v. 1, A-G, edited by Jonathan Lighter (New York: Random House, 1994), p. 638.

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • * 1962 , Jerome Weidman, The Sound of Bow Bells page 362:
  • As a matter of fact, this slob was full of information today. He told me why we Jews have different dorks .
  • * 2005 , Mike Judge, Reading Sucks: The Collected Works of Beavis and Butthead :
  • "There's that dork whose wife cut off his dork ." And when people ask him for an autograph he writes, "Best of luck to Betsy. Signed, the guy whose wife cut off his penis."
  • * 1962 , Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last year at Marienbad page 167:
  • I entitled the piece "Dorky", dork being slang for a person who does not belong to popular groups, usually an outsider, an odd person, sometimes inept, other times cranky.
  • * 1967 , Don Moser and Jerry Cohen, The Pied Piper of Tucson:
  • I didn’t have any clothes and I had short hair and looked like a dork . Girls wouldn’t go out with me.
    Usage notes
    Narrowly used to indicate someone inept or out of touch, broadly used to mean simply “silly, foolish”; compare (doofus), (twit).
    Derived terms
    * dorkface * to dorkify * dorkwad * dorky
    Synonyms
    * See also * See also

    Etymology 2

    Uncertain; apparently from (etyl). See (dirk).

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • (label)
  • References